Categories
Weblogging

Weblogging Feb 20 2002

Looks like the Boys of Blogging are heading out for a brew with the champion beer taster of Oz.

Of course, we know that they will sip their brew (or “piss” as they affectionately refer to it) rather than chug it down. And we know that they’ll limit themselves to a decorous 1-2 beers rather than 5, 9, 12 or more. After all, bloggers do everything with restraint, don’t we?

No inebriated night of debauchery for these gentlemen. No siree. Besides, Garth is getting married soon…he has to behave himself.

-earlier-

As can be seen from the time markups, all of my favorite webloggers are ahead of me in time. Their tomorrow is my today at some point. Or my today is their yesterday, from their perspective.

I can watch the weblogs come online as one would watch the sun rise in the East, set in the West. First up is members of the Australian Delegation (the +19); next is Chris in South Korea (+17) — depending on his consumption of plum wine, of course. Following is Mike in South Africa (+10), and then the Europeans such as Gary and A Secret Smile (+8), followed by Rogi in the Azores (+7). Finally comes the yanks in the state, Eastern part of the country first.

My blog is last to rise, last to set. Well, in the virtual neighborhood, that is.

Anyhow, on a related note, Sharon and I have been discussing a get together when I’m in the Washington DC area in May speaking at Nextware. If you’re an East Coaster, or if you’re attending NextWare, and are interested in a meet, holler, and we’ll see if we can’t work out a true blog party.

-earlier-

Chris sent me an email asking what the little “+xx” values were attached to each blog to the left. I answered that they were each blogger’s sex rating. Well, he was quite pleased with his rating. I imagine the Aussies would be quite pleased, too. However, Doc and others local to myself might be a tad uptight.

In case you’re curious, the numbers represent the time difference — in hours — between my home base and the other weblogs.

Categories
Travel

Heading Home

After having a terrific home style meal in a great restaurant, and two margaritas made by people who really know how to mix a drink, I am ready to start my voyage home tomorrow.

I’ve decided to go I70 until Colorado, cut down on I25 to I40, and hence over, eventually, to I5. The weather will be good, and I won’t have to deal with the Olympic mess in Salt Lake City.

You probably didn’t need to know this, but I have to rehearse it in my mind, get myself psyched. You all know how it goes.

Talk to you from San Francisco next. Until then, be good. If you can’t be good, then at least have fun.

-earlier-

Travelocity has a great deal on tickets to Australia.

What think? Should my next driving adventure be on the wrong…urh…other side of the road? I’ve driven LA — I can drive anything.

-earlier-

I can wear a shoe on the bad foot so tomorrow I’m heading home. The delay has put me into a potential snowy weather pattern going the northern route, but I’m going to try it and see what happens. The northern route is about 1 day shorter than the southern. And I can’t stand going on I40 through Texas, again.

A couple of options: I70 to Denver, then up I25 to I80 through Salt Lake City and Reno. Or I70 to Denver and down I25 to I40 at Albuquerque.

Anyone who happens to live in any of these areas, please drop me a note and let me know what the weather and traffic will be, will you?

Categories
Technology

UDDI Questions

Andy sent some questions on UDDI that I’m going to attempt to answer. If you agree, disagree, or have additions, please drop a comment.

Questions:

How do you compare UDDI to other methods of discovering networked resources

(may or may not be web services)

What’s the difference a global UDDI registry and…
– google: controlled by a single organization
– dmoz.org: open, and replicated by other search engines
– DNS: governed by ICANN, but organizations can apply to be registrars
– others?

Do the above services have the same weakness you attribute to a UDDI global registry?

In some ways, we’re talking apples, oranges, cherries, and perhaps some peaches. They’re all fruit, but the similarity ends at that point.

UDDI is a centralized discovery service managed by a consortium of organizations, the content of which may or may not be striped across serveral different servers. Information is added to the repository by submission of those with services to provide.

Google is a discovery service that is also centralized under one authority, but uses many different methods to discover information including automated agents (bots), subscription to other services (such as dmoz) and manual intervention.

Google, though, has an interesting twist to it’s discovery mechanism: it has a set of algorithms which are constantly evaluating and merging and massaging its raw data in order to provide additional measurements, ensuring higher degrees of accuracy and recency. The discovery of data is never the same two times running within a collection period.

The dmoz directory is a great open source effort to categorize information intelligently. In other words, the data is manually added and categorized to the directory. This makes the directory extremely efficient when it comes to human interpretation of data. You might say that with dmoz, the “bots” are human. You get the world involved then you have a high level of intelligent categorization of data. Only problem, though, is that human interpretation of data is just as unreliable as mechanical interpretation at times.

However, dmoz is probably the closest to UDDI of the network discovery services you’ve listed primarily because of this human intervention.

Finally, DNS. DNS does one thing and as pissy as people are about it, it does the one thing reasonably well. The web has grown to huge proportions with something like DNS to handle naming and location of resources.

In some ways, DNS is closest to what I consider an iron-free cloud if you look at it from an interpretation point of view (not necessarily implementation). You have all these records distributed across all these authoritative servers providing a definitive location of a resource. Then you have these other servers that basically do nothing more than query and cache these locations to make access to these resources more quickly and the whole framework more scalable.

In some ways I think UDDI is like DNS, also. You can have UDDI records distributed across different servers to make service lookup more efficient, and to make the whole process more scalable.

This same approach also happens with Circle, Chord, and Freenet if you think about it (the whole store and forward, query and cache at closer servers or peers so that the strain of the queries aren’t channeled to a few machines).

UDDI is like DNS for another reason: controlling organization and potential political problems. ICANN hasn’t had the best rep managing the whole DNS/registrar situation. In particular, you should ask some of the Aussie ISP’s what they think of the whole thing. They’ve had trouble with ICANN in the past.

All of the services share one common limitation: they all have hard coded entry points, and all have some organization as controller. I don’t care how altruistic the motives, there is a controlling body. There’s iron in all the approaches. All of them.

 

Categories
Web

Are Web Services ready for the Web

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The headline at news.com reads “Are Web Services Ready for the Web?”

This really annoyed me. Last time I heard, there was a web before Microsoft. And there will be a Web in spite of Microsoft. So the company outreached itself with .Net My Services. Well, that’s not surprising considering how little trust the world has in Microsoft to keep the data safe, as well as not use it inappropriately.

However, smart move on the company’s part now. Instead of trying to bull through with a business model that’s both confusing as well as problematical, Microsoft is going to come to the public with its hat in its hand and say “Well, we’re not sure where to go just yet. We’ve made mistakes.” After endearing themselves to all the people with these heartfelt sentiments, the little MS sharkies will sit back and watch to see how other companies fill the gap with workable and non-workable business models, and then swoop down and pick and choose among the approaches.

Deja Vu, all over again.

 

Categories
Weblogging

Weblogging Feb 19 2002

Through this incestuous circle of weblog linking with which we find ourselves, I found PageCount – Into the Lake of Fire, a blog created by Mike Golby from South Africa.

Mike trips fantastically over a wide variety of interrelated subjects, from Jeneane Sessum’s review of Chris Locke’s Bombast Transcripts to yesterday’s touching weblog posting that Chris made, dropping quotes from the bible equally with ones from Bob Dylan and Pete Seger. Sometimes dizzying but never dull — and that’s about the best thing you can say about a weblog, isn’t it?

-earlier-

Uh, oh. We’re going there again — you know where.

Jacob from FuzzyBlogic is weighing in on the you know what. And this was picked up by Doc, which was then picked up by Dave.

There’s a hell of a lot of *POP* going on in weblogdom today.

BTW, who all thinks I should offer to host Mike Sanders Keep Trying weblog on my server? Because I keep trying and keep trying and keep trying, but the site is inaccessible…a lot. At least, I’m having a lot of problems accessing the site.

-earlier-

I got tired of looking up people’s current times so I’m printing out my “home base” time in California, and then showing the hour difference between me and my favorite webloggers. This effort is a work in progress and times will be filled in as I find them for folks.

Small world, isn’t it?

-earlier-

Hey! I’m a faction!

Now I feel like I should get my gang and go beat someone up. Wait a sec…I did this already, yesterday.

I guess the scam now is to put the word G**glewhack into your weblog and try and steal Google hits according to Andy, who found this at Richard’s and Dave.

I also found out that there’s now an official G**glewhack site.

Why am I using the asterisks? Because I don’t want more hits for G**glewhack. This weblog isn’t about G**glewhack. As it is, I’m getting too many for Z*ldman because I mentioned him a couple of times.

No G**glewhack here. No Z*ldman, either. Just barbie’d chooch…and friends.

Update: Oooh. I’m so excited. I checked my referrers and found the following:

66.108.58.218 – – [16/Feb/2002:17:41:24 -0800] “GET /weblog/index.php HTTP/1.1” 200 42823 “http://www.frankieboots.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.13; Mac_PowerPC)”

I guess I’m in.

-earlier-

I was thinking of dropping the TechBlog. I was spending more time weblogging than working on my “regular” web site content and those babies are getting rusty.

However, I am addicted to weblogging — I am a blogaholic.

Instead of dropping TechBlog, I’m dropping two of my web sites: SolarLily and NetJetter. Thanks to my handy dandy PostCon (Post Content Management) system, it will be easy to merge their content into my other sites without 404 errors slipping through.

And I’m going to tie my P2P Smoke website into the TechBlog, since the latter focuses primarily on P2P anyhow.

BTW, I heard from Oracle about a possible position working on Financial software. I don’t know — am I an Oracle employee type of person? Can you all picture me working at Oracle?